Background
For the last decade or two their has been an increasing emphasis on research experiences for undergraduates, especially early experiences like projects in interdisciplinary labs. It may well be something high school students ask about: will I have opportunity to participate in research at this school.Status Quo
Actually, we aren't doing badly for early research experiences in the natural sciences. But at present it's unsystematic: a "program" that is dependent on individual faculty members figuring out how to make it work. And, it remains an uncompensated form of teaching.In addition to the opportunities we CAN offer on-campus, we encourage them to go off campus for research, but that isn't exactly sustainable if enrollments keep increasing, and, insofar as sometimes funding follows students, it's giving away potential resources.
Capacities
At the moment, in the natural sciences, the limitation on research opportunities is largely a function of the number of research-active faculty (funding would be a limitation if the program grew considerably).In chemistry, for example, we have three people who are research active, and each could manage, say, two summer students. So at most we can host six summer students, or less than half of the declared chemistry majors.A Scalable Plan
A first step would be to identify impediments to maximizing summer research capacity with existing faculty. Perhaps next we look at resource constraints that limit number of interns per faculty member (noted above as 2 in chemistry, for example).
A next step might be to develop some proposals (either by discipline or across several) and investigate funding for something along the lines of the REU programs at other institutions (the ones we send our students to).
It might also make sense to focus on infrastructure and on developing parallel programs in the social sciences and perhaps even the humanities. Ultimately this could evolve into summer employment for faculty (both tenure track and non-tenure track), fuller facility utilization, a way for students to fit in credit hours without taking 5 courses, and be a boon to retention.
